Monday, March 24, 2014

The Manner of Receiving Communion

The FIUV Position Paper on this subject - how we receive kneeling and on the tongue in the Extraordinary Form, and why - I published a while ago on Rorate Caeli. Like all the position papers, excluding the footnotes I kept it down to less than 1,600 words. Here's a 4 minute video on the subject.

4 comments:

What if someone, quoting Mediator Dei, charges that the modern practice is a providential development? They might say most might not have understood the benefits of communion in the tongue while kneeling when it was introduced just as we do not understand receiving in the hand while standing.

I would add one factor to what you have said, and it concerns the matter of anointed hands. It has long been a practise in the Church that only those with anointed hands should handle the Host or the Sacred Vessels. I don’t know how far back this understanding of the Real Presence goes but it is certainly to before the twelfth century, at least nine hundred years. St Francis, for instance, acknowledged this and declared that he would only receive for the anointed hands of a priest, even a sinful priest.

That this practise was dropped after Vatican II was no accident, in my humble opinion. Rather it was one of the many tricks used by the reformers to diminish belief in the Real Presence.